5 Best Tuesday Columns

Richard Cohen on Israel and Apartheid The Washington Post op-ed columnist makes
an impassioned argument to Israel's detractors to cut out comparisons to
apartheid. Cohen, noticeably rattled by a
Financial Times op-ed and the "imaginary grievances" of "Israel
Apartheid Week" on college campuses, determines that while Israel is certainly worthy of criticism, "The
Israel of today and the South Africa of yesterday have almost nothing
in common." (For a rebuttal, see Salon's Glenn Greenwald deliver an equally impassioned response.)

Israeli Arabs, about one-fifth of the country, have
the same civil and political rights as do Israeli Jews ... The West Bank,
more or less under Israeli military rule, is a different matter. But it
is not part of Israel proper, and under every conceivable peace plan... it will revert to the Palestinian Authority and become the
heartland of a Palestinian state ... Interestingly, [Israel's critics]
do not use it for Saudi Arabia, which maintains as perfect a system of
gender apartheid as can be imagined -- women can't even drive, never
mind vote -- or elsewhere in the Arab world, where Palestinians
sometimes have fewer rights than they do in Israel.

Bob Herbert on Troubling Police Tactics The New York Times columnist examines
the NYPD policy of random stop-and-searches, a practice that
disproportionately affects New York City's young men of color. Herbert
notes that "the people stopped had done nothing wrong" in "88.2 percent
of all stops" between 2004 and 2009, yet their personal information is
retained in a permanent police database whether they've committed a
crime or not. Herbert can reach no other conclusion than that "the
innocent people stopped are nevertheless permanently under suspicion."

Mona Charen on Voyeurism, Smugness, and Health A day after President Obama's annual physical was dissected by the blogosphere, the National Review columnist takes issue
with pundits' persistent questioning of the health habits of public
figures. Charen deems the practice equal parts voyeurism and smugness. "We
have arrived at a cultural moment when no one would dream of waxing
judgmental about your sexual life or your manners, but we feel free to
place you in metaphorical stocks for offenses against health. To prove
yourself, show us your HDL-to-LDL ratio!"

The Los Angeles Times on Economics and the Earth A pair of of professors, Yale's F. Herbert Bormann and UC Santa Barbara's Bruce Mahall, pen
a guest op-ed calling for fundamental shifting in our socioeconomic
model to be in harmony with the workings of Mother Nature. Any readers
who might have mistakenly thought the column was tongue-in-cheek
quickly encountered the duo's strident calls for change.

We
need to find ways to avoid changing Earth in irreversible directions.
We need to soberly evaluate anthropocentric economics' sacred cow,
growth, in light of sustainability. And we need to think beyond our own
brief lifetimes. Most important, in the new terracentric model, we need
to acknowledge that there is nothing more important than preserving the
viability of planet Earth. Nothing.

Harold Ford Jr. on Leaving the Senate Race The former representative from Tennessee and chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council explains
his decision to withdraw from this year's Senate special election in
New York. (See the full reaction to his op-ed here.) "If I run, the likely result would be a brutal and highly
negative Democratic primary -- a primary where the winner emerges
weakened and the Republican strengthened," Ford writes. He enumerates
his disappointments with the state's Democratic Party, but affirms that
he won't "do anything that would help Republicans win a Senate seat in
New York."

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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Jared Keller is a journalist based in New York. He has written for Bloomberg Businessweek, Pacific Standard, and Al Jazeera America, and is a former associate editor for The Atlantic.